AT THE CONTROLS : Bill Sedgwick’s Racing Fortunes Quickly Accelerated When Fleet of NASCAR Cars Was Placed in His Care

Just two years ago Bill Sedgwick of Van Nuys was in auto racing’s slow lane. With little money and little experience outside Saugus Speedway, Sedgwick was a weekend racer who made his living as a mechanic at a Hollywood garage. Racing got to be so expensive that he was forced to sell his pride and joy, a Winston Cup 1986 Chevrolet Monte Carlo.

But Sedgwick’s career has taken off. Today, he flies to races in a private jet, heads a six-man team that builds and maintains a fleet of racing cars and finds himself atop the points standings in the $1.3 million NASCAR Winston West Series. What sparked the turnaround? Strangely enough, it all goes back to the low-water mark in his career when he had to sell the Monte Carlo.

In April, 1987, his friend and mentor, fellow race driver Roman Calczynski of Sepulveda, brought manufacturing mogul Wayne Spears to look at Sedgwick’s car. Spears owns Spears Manufacturing Co. in Sylmar, a producer of plastic pipes. His hobby is race cars, and he races them under the banner of Spears Motor Sports. Spears bought Sedgwick’s car and took him and Calczynski to lunch.

A week later, Calczynski called Sedgwick and told him that Spears was offering him a job to race cars, run the racing team and oversee Spears’ 10,000-square-foot auto shop. Curiously, Sedgwick didn’t go out and do wheelies on Van Nuys Boulevard. Racing was in his blood, but it was also his hobby.

“I didn’t know if should make my hobby my business,” Sedgwick, 34, says. “Sometimes that’s not a good idea.”

But Spears followed with a phone call and Sedgwick took the job, becoming the third Bill at the shop. “It seems that everybody who works for me is named Bill,” Spears says. “So I call Sedgwick Ned.”

Why did Spears hire Ned, er, Bill? “I’m always looking for good people to work for me,” he says. “Ned is the kind of people you like to be around. He is a really good guy, he cares and he’s not lazy. You don’t see him watching the clock. And I knew he was a lot better driver than he had a chance to show. He had no money or equipment. I’ve given him that.”

Sedgwick now works in a motor sports equivalent of the Magic Kingdom. He goes to work every weekday at Spears’ 80-acre spread in Agua Dulce. Visitors are observed by a video camera mounted on a pole by an automatic iron gate. A partly paved road leads past the main house, a huge Spanish-modern complex, and winds down to the shop.

Accompanied by the whine and hum of engines, mechanics work in almost operating-room conditions on a half-dozen cars, most of them painted in Spears’ colors: blue and white, with the number 75 painted on the doors. The cars will be driven in Winston West races by Sedgwick and in NASCAR Southwest Tour races by Calczynski, who won the series last year. When Calczynski races, Sedgwick is co-crew chief for him.

“We develop things at the shop,” Sedgwick says, conducting a tour. “We even build our own oil pumps, which nobody else does, and make a lot of our own parts at Wayne’s plant. Wayne says the limit of what we can make is what we can think.”

Cars have always occupied a large part of Sedgwick’s mind. At John Marshall High, he got straight A’s in auto mechanics and was “always messing around with cars, even before I had a license,” he says. “They were something I always understood.” He put a high-performance engine, header and glass packs in his first car, a ’65 Malibu, and did a lot hot-rodding. He tried drag racing “but it took so long to get to the starting line, and you’re done in 10 1/2 seconds,” that he needed another challenge.

In 1978, a friend took him to Saugus Speedway to watch the races. “I was hooked,” he says. “That night I got a set of rules and started building a car for the next season.” In his first race in ‘79, his ’64 Pontiac GTO qualified 15th out of 35 cars and came in seventh. He was in second in points standings the following year and in ’83 won the track’s Street Stock figure-8 championship.

In his early days at Saugus, Sedgwick raced against Calczynski. “He played a few tricks on me to beat me,” says Sedgwick, who then went out and used “the mind games” against other drivers.

Last year, his first full season with Spears, Sedgwick drove a limited schedule in the Winston West Series. This year, he plans to drive in all 11 races. After the first three races, Sedgwick has two wins and a third, putting him in first place in the points standings and making him the odds-on favorite to win rookie-of-the-year honors.

“It doesn’t surprise me a bit” that Sedgwick could be the top rookie, Spears says. “I think he can even win the championship.”